No, I don’t really like to talk about my comics. They should speak for themselves.

Indeed. But in news we’re surprised that Splash Page hasn’t jumped on already, Jason lets slip the info that I KILLED ADOLF HITLER, his time travel masterpiece, has been optioned for a film.

Have you been approached by anyone about adapting one of your comics?

People have expressed interest in doing movies versions. One of the books, I Killed Adolf Hitler has been optioned. I’m not holding my breath though. If it happens, it happens. It just seems like a small miracle every time a good movie is made, especially in Hollywood.

We won’t hold our breath either — and it’s certainly not necessary–but it would be a great story for a movie. Is there anyone who would be up for the task of directing this tale? What do YOU think?

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Comments

I’m afraid that approach to time travel is so outdated, there’s not much that can be done with it, IMO. Assuming that the effects of the assassination aren’t worked out in detail, in the form of an alternate history, whether the assassin realizes he made a mistake and goes back in time again to prevent his own action, or the assassination changes history to the extent that the assassin isn’t born and a paradox results, the end result is still a mess. That’s the kind of story the alternate timeline system specifically eliminates.

A contract killer goes back in time to kill Hitler…and fails spectacularly.
For his latest graphic novel (the third in color, the ninth to be published by Fantagraphics) Jason posits a strange, violent world in which contract killers can be hired to rub out pests, be they dysfunctional relatives, abusive co-workers, loud neighbors, or just annoyances in general–and as you might imagine, their services are in heavy demand.
One such killer is given the unique job of traveling back in time to kill Adolf Hitler in 1939…but things go wrong, Hitler overpowers the would-be assassin and sends himself to the present, leaving the killer stranded in the past.
The killer eventually finds his way back into the present by simply waiting the decades out as he ages, and teams up with his now much-younger girlfriend to track down the missing fascist dictator…at which point the book veers further into Jason territory, as the cartoonist’s minimalist, wickedly dry sense of humor slows down the story to a crawl: for long patches absolutely nothing happens, but nobody can make nothing happening as riotously entertaining as Jason does…and finally, when the reader isn’t paying attention, he brings it together with a shocking, perfectly logical and yet completely unexpected climax which also solves a mystery from the very beginning of the book the reader had forgotten about.
As always, “I Killed Adolf Hitler” is rendered in Jason’s crisp deadpan neo-clear-line style, once again augmented by lovely, understated coloring.

The story as described doesn’t work as time travel. It’s impossible for anyone to travel into his own future, and the life of the would-be assassin would overlap his birth, but in absurdist fiction, the plot details don’t matter much, so I’m willing to believe that the story succeeds as intended.

In SF, though, there’s simply no point in telling single-timeline time travel stories any more. Time travel paradoxes are logical impossibilities, and stories in which the leads strive to avoid causing paradoxes, or fix them when they happen, will invariably be repetitious. I’ve seen far too many stories over the last several years in which the point of the stories is to create paradoxes and other time travel snarls and treat them as dramatic problems to be solved. But the stories didn’t make sense, of course, so readers responded by complaining that they didn’t make sense and, in some cases, complained that time travel stories in general don’t make sense. That’s bullshit. It’s the shared responsibility of the writer and editor to ensure that the time travel story makes sense, as would be the case with any published story.